The same drawing can look dramatically more polished or more amateur depending purely on its color palette. Because a pixel art canvas is so small to begin with, color choices show up far more visibly than they would in a regular illustration. This guide covers both building a palette from scratch and borrowing a well-made free one.
Why limit your color count at all
Using millions of freely-picked colors, the way you might in Photoshop or Paint, tends to make a piece look messy rather than rich. More colors means more colors competing with each other, blurring the shape, and using different colors across animation frames breaks visual consistency. For beginners, starting with 8-16 colors per character is a good rule of thumb. A limited palette forces you to express form and depth through value and shape instead of color variety.
A basic order for building a palette
- 1. Pick your dominant colorChoose one or two colors that will cover the largest area of the character or scene.
- 2. Build out value stepsFrom that base color, create roughly two lighter and two darker steps for highlights and shadows.
- 3. Add accent colorsAdd two or three accent colors for eyes, weapons, or items that need to catch the eye.
- 4. Check the mid-tonesIf the jump between value steps feels too abrupt, add a slightly desaturated mid-tone to smooth the transition.
Don't shade with plain black or gray
One of the most common beginner mistakes is darkening shadows with flat black or gray. Well-built pixel art palettes instead shift the hue toward cool tones (blue/purple) in shadow and toward warm tones (yellow/orange) in highlights. That single change makes lighting read as actual light hitting a surface, rather than just "darker" and "lighter."
Borrowing a free palette
If building one from scratch feels like too much up front, a proven free palette works just as well. The Lospec Palette List is a well-known archive of thousands of palettes made by other pixel artists, filterable by color count and tag, and most are free to use. Popular examples include the 24-color "Endesga 32" and the 16-color "AAP-64" family - palettes like these already have proven color harmony, which saves beginners a lot of trial and error.
Once you've picked a palette
It also helps to study other work made with the same palette. Browse PixelCraft Studio's pixel image picks to see icons drawn with a limited color count. If you haven't settled on a base sprite size yet, read the sprite size guide first.
Frequently asked questions
How many colors is the right amount?
8-16 colors per character is a solid starting point. Keeping a whole-game palette (backgrounds included) within 32-48 colors also keeps the screen looking unified. More colors isn't better - reading a shape with few colors is the core skill in pixel art.
How do I pick shadow colors?
Don't just lower the value of the base color. Lower the value and also rotate the hue slightly toward blue/purple, adjusting saturation a little. Rotate highlights toward yellow/orange and lighting starts to read as real light.
Can I use a free palette in a commercial game?
Most Lospec palettes are free to use, and a color arrangement itself is barely copyrightable. Still, get in the habit of checking the license and any credit request noted on each palette's page.
Related guides: Sprite size · Dithering basics · UI & HUD icon design